Morphomic structure in Mauritian Kreol: On change, complexity and creolization

This paper contributes to the ongoing debate on morphological structure, complexity and change in both the area of morphology and that of creolistics by revisiting the phenomenon of verb form alternation in Mauritian Kreol (I will from here onwards refer to the language as Mauritian for readability even though speakers refer to it as kreol.), a French lexified creole. Using a lexical database of 2039 distinct verbs, I show that contrary to previous assumptions, the verb alternation found in Mauritian cannot strictly be reduced to phonological or morphosyntactic principles. I argue that Mauritian has evolved a purely morphological distinction between two verb forms of the same lexeme (a long and a short form) whose heterogeneous distribution can be characterized as morphomic (Aronoff, 1994; Maiden 2018)—and therefore as contributing significantly to the system’s integrative complexity (Ackerman and Malouf 2013). The existence of morphomic structure crucially weakens repeated claims about creoles’ ‘exceptional’ status. The diachronic emergence of the alternation does not in fact constitute grammatical simplification. Rather, Mauritian verb forms are a reflex of the French paradigmatic organization whose function is exapted in the linguistic ecology in which Mauritian emerged. The type of recalibration witnessed in the Mauritian verb system offers a new lens into creole genesis, which is consistent with the view that morphology is a complex adaptive system whose development is driven by discriminative learning and communicative constraints.